Only in Naples

Lessons in Food and Famiglia From My Italian Mother-in Law

Arriving in Naples as a naive young intern at the American Consulate, Katherine is set up on a blind date - at least that's what she's expecting. Instead, Salvatore brings her home to eat pizza with his family. But this is no ordinary pizza, and the woman who makes it is no ordinary woman.

Katherine and Salve do end up dating - and marrying - but it's Salvatore's mother who truly initiates Katherine into Italian society, offering her a culinary and cultural education that marks the beginning of her womanhood.

Along the way, Katherine dabbles in dubbing porn, learns to cook an octopus, and fends off frisky Italian suitors. Most importantly, she acquires carnale , the quintessentially Neapolitan sense of living with comfort and confidence in one's body. Only in Naples recalls the rich and wry culinary writing of Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking and the charmingly eccentric family portraits of Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend Th­is Never Happened .

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I enjoyed this slice of Italian life- even though I wanted to hate the author for being so lucky to have the opportunities afforded by her trust fund and her wealthy American family. She does concede that her seemingly perfect life included as stint of self-loathing due to her weight issues and binge-eating.

I found this novel to be a romanticized and overly simplistic account of Neapolitan culture, lacking in depth and grounding. It actually infuriated me (which doesn't happen often for me with a novel; yes, my own Neapolitan heritage just might have influenced that opinion).

After graduating from college, well-to-do Katherine Wilson left Washington, D.C. and headed to Naples, Italy for an unpaid internship at the American Consul. Though Naples was considered "dirty and dangerous" by her friends and family, she discovered that people either loved or hated the city, and she loved it. Not only did she learn to eat better (she'd been a binge eater), but she was embraced by an Italian family and their chic, well-connected matriarch, Raffaella, who taught Wilson about Neapolitan culture and how to cook delicious local foods -- and eventually lessons about marriage and motherhood when Wilson married her son. This lighthearted, charming look at Italian life includes recipes.